May 15-21. Performance records: a laboratory
Performance records is an artistic laboratory and program at Weld organized by Oda Brekke with Alexander Talts, Leah Landau, Lisa Schåman, Maia Means, Max Wallmeier, Simon Labbé, Sonja Pregrad and Tuuli Vahtola .
The word record refers to a traced action, but also brings to mind technologies of control and productivity. Can the experience of tracing disrupt the continuous acceleration and projection that characterizes contemporary forms of alienation?
The local and international artists are invited to return together to a conversation that has already begun. Over the course of a week they will exchange and study the role of memory and trace in their respective practices of performance.
During the week there will be two public presentations with performances by dance artist Sonja Pregad (HR) and artist Simon Labbé (CA). These public gatherings will also include text material proposed by the group: a compilation of traces opening their process to a public through reading.
PUBLIC PROGRAMME
Free admission
Book: book.weld.se
Tuesday May 16t
at 6–9pm
ELMD : the archaeologist (aria).
Performance Installation by Simon Labbé
Ongoing reading of texts proposed by the laboratory
The door will be open during the three hours of the performance and you are invited to come and go as you like.
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Sunday May 21
at 4pm
Object of Dance (where is performance when it’s not there)?
Performance by Sonja Pregrad
The performance lasts 30 minutes and is followed by a reading session and conversation with Alexander Talts, Leah Landau, Lisa Schåman, Maia Means, Max Wallmeyer, Oda Brekke, Simon Labbé, Sonja Pregrad and Tuuli Vahtola.
at 5pm
Reading of traces from the week and conversation with the artists of the laboratory
Made possible with support from Weld, the Swedish Arts Council and the Nordic Culture Fund
ELMD : the archaeologist (aria).
Performance Installation by Simon Labbé
Every morning, I have coffee and sit with my notebook for about 45 minutes. I write the date down and underline it, right after where I’d left off the previous day. It’s typically around 7:30 or 8 in the morning and I am sitting at the top of the carpet in my living room facing the east-facing window overlooking the street. As the day opens up for me, I draw a line and follow it, tracing down thoughts about the previous day and night, a scaffolding of abstractions or images from dreams, often entangled through some work I’m absorbed in, some questions it brings up. Lots of questions and loose ends actually. I almost never read any of it again, but I know some fragments get repeated, almost word for word from day to day. I’m keeping them with me as witnesses of an encounter, until they’re metabolized perhaps and can finally be forgotten.
ELMD : the archaeologist (aria) is a performance installation that follows a score of repetitions and reactivations through different practices of remembering. It is invested in various media of inscription and their use as tools for capturing the fleetingness of time, the gestures it breeds. The work asks how any new technology for memorizing always also implies a new form of forgetting.
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Object of Dance (where is performance when it’s not there)?
Performance by Sonja Pregrad
Back in 2010, talking about how depressing it is to make performances in a context in which they are rarely performed more than a few times, S.M. says to me: ’Where is the show when it’s not there?’ Performance, like a philosophical thought, architecture of a building or Duchamp’s urinal – is created as a speculation of the absolute and the eternal. Performances (that are not there) thus are ghosts, apparitions that haunt their authors, and in some sense the whole community.
Using fragments from her performance Object of Dance to think along the processes of the lab (of memory and trace in performance). She will be working with the statuses of the body and performance in the relationship between dance and other media: drag, theory, material practices, archiving.
ALEXANDER TALTS (SE)
is a literature theorist and writer with a background in dance and choreography. He is currently pursuing a masters program in comparative literature at Södertörn University. Since 2022, Alexander has been part of the production group of My Wild Flag, an annual festival for queer dance, performance and choreography in Stockholm.
LEAH LANDAU (AUS/SE)
is an artist working with dance, choreography, text and curation in Stockholm. As a dancer Leah most recently performed in Communal Rope for QUATRO (SWE); Ultimate Dancer a.k.a Louise Ahl’s (SWE/UK) six hour epic saga Hevi Metle at Baltic Circle for Contemporary Art Newcastle (2020) and choreographer Luke George’s (AUS) Public Actions at Dance Massive Festival, Melbourne (2019) and Keir Choreographic Award (2018). Together with dance colleagues across the world, Leah set up A Class for A Cause: an online public teaching resource where anyone can teach a class and propose a charity to donate to (or pay themselves), designed to connect a wide community of dancers/body practitioners in times of COVID-19 and beyond. As a choreographer, Leah most recently performed her work A/P D/V at part of the ImpulsTanz ATLAS program in Vienna; Back then, flying meant you could land in a farmer’s field (2021) at Hallen Stockholm; Goat Talk at Dans Massa (2019), Stockholm and Dance Massive Open Studio Program, Melbourne (2019), Smoke Smoking at Danscentrum Stockholm (2019); Romancer at Lucy Guerin Inc.’s Pieces for Small Spaces program 2016 (Melbourne), among many more. Leah completed her Masters in New Performance Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden, in 2021 and currently teaches Master and Bachelor students at the same university; and at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland.
LISA SCHÅMAN (AX/SE)
works with experimental dance and choreography. Since her Bachelor degree in dance 2015 from Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) she has worked with choreographers such as Mirko Guido), Ellen Söderhult , Peter Mills, Leah Landau, Malin Elgán and Oda Brekke. Lisa has studied Aesthetics at Södertörn University and is a member in both the platform INSISTER SPACE and höjden studios. In 2018 she received the DanceWEB-scholarship.
MAIA MEANS (NO/DK)
is a Stockholm-based freelance dancer who holds a BA in Dance Performance from DOCH, Stockholm University of the Arts. Currently she works with choreographers Oda Brekke, Sindri Runudde, Halla Olofsdottir & Eliisa Erävalo, Ellard/Lech, and Mette Ingvartsen. Together with Max Wallmeier, she has created two books which are slowly developing into a performance.
Maia is co-editor of the choreographic publication This Container and has created several zines, books and texts which accommodate choreographic proposals. She was part of starting up INSISTER SPACE, a feminist initiative for structures of solidarity within the dance field, and is also in the board of höjden, an interdisciplinary artist-driven workplace in Östberga, Stockholm.
MAX WALLMAIER (DE/DK)
is a choreographer and dancer based in Copenhagen. He holds a BfA in Dance Performance from Uniarts in Stockholm and an MfA in Choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. He worked for choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Luísa Saraiva and Lisa Bysheim and as a member of Weld Company in Stockholm.
As a maker, he is interested in the subtleties of asking for and paying attention. The way that movement unfolds in time is central in his artistic research. How do changes in this unfolding affect a dancer’s and the audience’s experience and how can it be used to create resonance? In his latest research project In the Wake he invited several collaborators to create duets and a group piece with a focus on reversibility as a movement principle and composition strategy.
He works in an ongoing collaboration with Maia means, in which they explore choreographic strategies to book- and dancemaking.
ODA BREKKE (SE/NO)
is a dance artist based in Stockholm, working internationally as a choreographer, writer and performer. Her work is characterized by a material approach to perception, favoring detail to total overview. She is curious of dwelling with rooms and the things inhabiting them– tricking the sense of linear time and utilitarian relationships to objects. Her work When there’s only surface left premiered at Weld 2021 and has been presented at the festival IMPROSPEKCIJE at Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, Bergen Kjøtt, Dance Cooperative in Copenhagen and höjden studios. She was part of the editorial team behind the publication Art as Practice|Art as Object published by Skogen in Gothenburg 2020. Oda is a co-founder of the collective studio space höjden in Stockholm, a collegial platform and common resource for autonomous production and artistic exchange since 2019.
SIMON LABBÉ (CA/NL)
is committed to a transdisciplinary composition practice. He privileges listening, movement and reading as modes of engagement for the deployment of performances, text-based and recorded pieces, architectural installations and experimental workshops through which he explores the entanglement of beliefs and desires, materials and affects, the real and the imaginary. His research borrows from architecture, semiotics, choreography, post-cybernetic theory and process philosophy. Lately, he’s been interested in examining how models of the world shape the world. He often works collaboratively with performers, musicians and writers and has presented work in Europe, Canada, Mexico and the US. He is currently based in the Netherlands.
SONJA PREGRAD (HR)
is a choreographer, performer, pedagogue and performance curator. She holds an MA Solo Dance Authorship from Universitaet der Kunste Berlin and has also studied at ArteZ institute in Arnhem, SNDO in Amsterdam and Codarts in Rotterdam. She has been awarded for organisation of the festival Improspekcije (since 2007), for her choreographic and performance work she has received three Croatian National Theatre Awards and 5 nominations, three Croatian Dance Associations Awards and a special mention of 26th Slavonian Biennale. In her work as a choreographer, dance is always thought of as a relational gesture, her choreography extending from re-inventing body-based practices to re-appropriating performance formats. Sonja made works on her own and developed different long-term artistic collaborations, performing her work internationally. She has been involved into different grass-root initiatives within the art communities of Zagreb and Berlin. She is a founder and producer of the festival Improspekcije (since 2007), Fourhanded and Object of Dance associations and Antisezona collective running a program of performance art at Contemporary Art Museum in Zagreb. As a performer she has been working with choreographers Meg Stuart, Isabelle Schad, visual artist Sanja
Iveković, and others. She has been continuously teaching at New Media department of Fine Art Academy and Dance department of Dramatic Art Academy in Zagreb and at ROAR Berlin independent program.
TUULI VAHTOLA (FI)
is a dance and performance artist who lives in Helsinki. She works by herself and with others in different roles: performing, choreographing, in dramaturgical conversation. In her work Tuuli is intrigued by questions of intimacy and touch as well as the corporeality of language. Since 2018 Tuuli has been a member of Precarious Practices, a Helsinki based working group and a platform focusing on artistic exchange and formed by twelve freelance artists in the field of dance and choreography. Tuuli graduated from DOCH/Stockholm University of the Arts in 2017 and holds a BA in Dance Performance.
Weld is supported by Stockholms stad, the Swedish Arts Council and Region Stockholm